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...he swears by using a starting hand chart. His micros coach gave him a set of hand charts to print out, but he has fine tuned them and inputted them into a neat little database (on his laptop) that he uses while grinding.

He calculates the optimal preflop play with any given hand by entering his holecards, position, # of limpers, raises faced and one or two of the opponents critical stats (if possible).

His coach (a "famous" reg/blogger/coach on 2+2) advised to use hand charts and ABC poker at 1/2, 2/5, 5/10 NL... but my friend persists on using them past 10NL. He has a winrate of 9bb/100 over atleast 300k hands

Is he just running lucky? Should I do a review of his software and post here? I meet up with him later this month. He has promised to walk me through his methods. Sorry for poor english, please tell your opinions and what I can ask him.

Hmm... Starting hand selection should also take in to account the opening ranges and calling ranges of the other players. The system also doesn't account for post-flop play. I'd say that his success is due to more than his starting hand algorithm.

9bb over 300k isn't a heater - he's definitely a profitable player at the stakes he is playing.

I'm sorry if I offended you. The entire point of the joke is that there is no appropriate response because it makes no sense at all. It was originally an autocorrected text message in the middle of an argument. hiphoprising is not a moron for answering like that, it's pretty obvious he was referring to my statement:

Simply using a hand chart will not make you a winning player, if he is putting up 9bb/100 at 25NL and higher he is obviously skilled in other aspects of the game. That being said, a chart can help build the proper fundamentals for a tight-aggressive game plan; and it makes it much harder to stray into loose/passive play. I don't use one and have a decent winrate at 25 and 30 NL but I haven't tried to use one (so I guess I can't really say which method is better). The tendencies of other players is crucial in poker and I feel a chart can't really account for this fully. I would say I definitely play a lot looser from the button and cutoff than most hand charts would suggest and it seems to work well.

with a winrate like that, he's very likely playing very well postflop, and he could make another bb/100 or two by widening his preflop range a little bit. it's unlikely (though possible) that he's "lucky" to be winning, but it IS somewhat more likely that he's running better than his true average. for example, i wouldn't be surprised if after a million hands, he's had a bad run or two and he's "only" averaging 6 or 7 bb/100.

I would say a decent amount of his success would be due to using this spreadsheet. It's not really a hand chart, it's more of a math based dynamic adjustment to his opponents' tendencies put down on paper. Most new players can probably go years without ever internalising this, so he's got a decent head start.

I assume he's either running this off of preflop equities or hard data based on results. Either way, his method is going to put him in spots with positional and card advantages which go a long ways towards alleviating any skill disadvantage and in a much more appropriate opponent dependent way than a standard hand chart will.

I think he's saying that based on playing and raising/calling frequency his methodology is leading him to play a range of hands that tends to have an equity advantage over his opponents' common hand ranges. This would lead to hitting a lot more flops, and often hitting them better than his opponents.

That said, I'm with others who suspect his postflop tendencies are a bigger source of his winrate than merely his hand selection, especially if he's playing a lot in position and making sure to take position shots at pots when checked to.

You still have to play well during the hand. This is where you make or lose money. Preflop action is only a small piece of the puzzle. It doesn't matter how good your chart is if you play poorly on the flop, turn, and river.

If I was a suspicious man, I would say this is a fake post from someone that is trying to drum up business for that "famous coach". I wonder how many "beginners" just randomly get "introduced" to poker and end up getting coaching immediately and playing 300,000 hands.